The present invention relates to managing a data cache for a computer system.
Computer systems commonly comprise one or more caches arranged to speed up the provision of data across the system. A copy of data from an original data source is stored in the cache. In response to a request for the data, the requested data is provided from the cache instead of the data of from the original data source. Where data sources are not local to a data requestor, a cache provided locally to the requestor can thus speed up provision of the relevant data.
Some data, such as web pages, can be provided with a mechanism, commonly referred to as directives, arranged to prevent data being cached. The hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) used for communicating data in the form of web pages across networks comprises header fields that can be used to specify such directives that set expected or required behaviours. One such header is a cache control header that can be used by the web page provider to specify whether or not the given page should be cached. However such cache controls are commonly over-specified in that some data may benefit from caching despite such cache controls.
Therefore, there is a need in the art to address the aforementioned problem.